28.3

 

Instantly, there is what seems to be a vast, silent horizon unfurling inside her mind. Roisin gasps, staggering as the world sharpens into unbearable clarity. The mantle expands inside her, stiffening her spine and steadying her back, but even its ancient awareness cannot shield her from the scale of what she is seeing.

Because she is not seeing the crowd, she is seeing every mind in it. Not their thoughts or their memories, and certainly not the secrets they’ve kept from their loved ones for most of their lives, because Justice has come for the tipping point of the whole world, not individuals, because they will be judged at another time.

What she sees is their emotional states; their fears and assumptions; their misreading, misconceptions and cultural biases; their predisposition the lead or be bed; their deep rooted xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism and their deep seated, never-even-tell-their-mates views about racism.

The mantle of Knowledge does not give her omniscience, but the ability to discern pattens, like the emotional life simulation she saw from a distance. The pattern here is terrifying. It paints the crowd in broad stroke, as if Lowry was painting his factory scenes with a fifty-millimetre decorator’s brush. She doesn’t see details like individual faces  or ages, she sees clusters of emotions sparking from a source and rippling outward. Fear tightens like a fist over a live wasp and intersects with a wave of anger spreading from someone with an over-zealous sense of anger about something trivial. She sees the young mother’s panic as she runs toward her child, her sight set on the security guards who are slipping into action, unholstering pistols and raising machine guns. She sees several police officers still reacting to the security guards and a group of protestors raise their hands, ready to throw stones and other missiles at either the supporters or the police. She sees the security guards levelling weapons and the supporters pulling out knives, chains and batons from concealed pockets about their person.

She sees the smile on the face of the man in the suit, and the wings carefully folded under the craftsman-level tailoring.

Each of these actions is another intersection in the web of possibilities and each intersection is a potential fracture in the world, and each fracture would be a call to the Four.

Roisin shivers, the computations of possibilities expanding rapidly out of control and she shakes her head. “This is too much.” A sharp tang of blood floods her mouth as she bites through the edge of her bottom lip. The mantle expands to take in the crowd. Twenty-four thousand people, every one of which with a physical response hard- wired to their emotional stat.

She takes a long, deep breath and two thoughts flow through her. Astaroth’s advice that every calamity starts with a single, small action and, oddly, why the fuck can she, as an ethereal Angel of Justice, bite her fucking lip and draw blood?

Now she can feel the moment that is about to ignite the chaos. It is the tiny gnat caught on a single strand of this giant spider’s web, and she if the weaver herself, testing the strand to draw closer, aware that to hurry bill be to lose the prize.

She can feel the single misunderstanding; the single misread gesture; the spark that lights this powder keg and propels the world into a dismal future.

She sees unfold in a preview of forthcoming attractions. The woman reaches in her bag for a toy to tempt the child to her side; the officer takes a hold of the child’s arm, attempting to still his movement and return him to his mother; the protestor misinterpreting the officer’s action as an attempt to detain and deport the child and his mother and the speaker’s security and supporter’s reading the protestor’s shout of alarm as a cry to initiate an attack.

The fracture will come from a chain reaction of a single child becoming separated from its mother.

Roisin takes another breath, inhaling the scent of Monday mince from Sunday’s roast; bubble and squeak from leftover vegetables; candle wax and urine-soaked sheets. She opens herself to the emotional field as her awareness spreads outward like a silent, invisible wave not to change anyone’s mind or chip away at their prejudices, nor to ease away anyone’s fear of another person’s point of view, but simply give them the clarity to reveal the truth of the moment to them

The shift is too subtle for anyone to notice, but the woman pulls out a stuffed toy, the officer lifts the child onto his shoulders, where they can see over the crowd to locate their mother; the protestor smiles as the child points excitedly at the mother waving their toy and the security guard holds up an arm to single a stay of aggression.

Roisin feels the mantle hum as balance is achieved and the world rights itself by a hair’s breadth. She feels the shift ripple through the square like a soft exhale.